


you looked so good in green

by ImNotStubborn



Category: Holby City
Genre: Angst, F/F, hello it's me two weeks in a row what the hell is happening, look it's another too short prompt fill with a cheesy song title!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 00:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17375708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImNotStubborn/pseuds/ImNotStubborn
Summary: Weekly Berena Fix, prompt #2: Scar





	you looked so good in green

Bernie groans out loud as teeth sink into her neck without warning, not deeply enough to actually pierce skin but definitely leaving a mark and making her lose her balance. She thankfully still has a clear enough mind to think of reaching behind her and slamming the door, before their tangling bodies land roughly against it.

She hears smug chuckling close to her ear and almost lets herself get annoyed, until a tongue soothes the bruising skin and she forgets everything but that feeling for a second, that wetness on her pulse point and the fire it ignites that spreads everywhere else.

Still. She's ex-Major Berenice Freaking Wolfe, she knows to give as good as she gets. She innocently lets her fingers thread into soft strands, pretending to simply massage the skin that's so easy to get to underneath the masculine haircut she's been admiring for months, and then, with a sudden and sharp tug at the roots, forces a shocked gasp out of the brunette's throat.

Bernie takes advantage of the element of surprise and all but rips the other surgeon's –mostly unbuttoned by now anyway– shirt off in one fluid motion with her free hand, reversing their positions swiftly and using her mouth to trace her way down newly exposed skin, soft moans spurring her on.

Unsurprisingly, they fight for control all the way to Bernie's lumpy bed, like they're in that first theatre they had to scrub in together all those months ago, back when they were still sizing each other up. And surprisingly because she wasn’t sure up until now that she could still pull it off, Bernie wins by using a close combat move she learned years ago in another life, trapping her colleague's body underneath her own.

She sits up swiftly, getting rid of her own top and bra in one fluid motion. And stops when the playful smirk on her friend's face turns into a concerned frown. She looks down at herself, curious and, right in the ray of moonlight coming in from the window, identifis what made the other woman tick.

“Bernie…” she starts softly, too softly, straightening up as well as she can, putting all of her weight on one elbow and extending the other to touch the scar on Bernie's sternum.

But the blonde stills her right before contact, catching the wandering hand in her own and closing her eyes as she shakes her head slightly, unable and unwilling to look at her right now.

“Bernie,” she hears again, a bit firmer this time –and Bernie almost smiles at the authoritarian tone that, of course, makes an appearance in the bedroom too. “It's okay… I'm not going to hurt you.”

Bernie almost laughs, and only wants to spill out the truth right then and there instead of letting this sweet, tough but really sweet woman, think this is some sort of psychological repercussions of working in war zones for so long acting up. When reality is so much less heroic than that, when it's almost as comically sordid as it is common, when Bernie is light years away from the saint this woman thinks she is.

When the reason she doesn't want Sarah touching her there, doesn't want to let her explore this part of her, has nothing to do with the scar itself or the incident it came from, and everything to do with another woman whose omnipresence in Bernie's thoughts is exactly why  _Sarah_  should be the one recoiling in fear of getting hurt. Because the first person to have touched Bernie there after the surgery and the divorce and the coming out and everything she went through when she got home –the last place she expectedwould bring her so much pain considering her career– was Serena, and Bernie knows before she even gives it a chance to happen that no matter how skilled or gentle her lovers might be from now, nothing will ever feel as complete, as mending as it did that first night she let Serena soothe the still healing skin with her uniquely hungry yet still delicate touch.

Serena, who is possibly fooling around with someone else right now, too, and probably playing a lot fairer than Bernie is. Fairer because Serena might have slipped almost a year ago, and even knowing that her mistake was only the last straw in their degrading relationship doesn’t completely erase the feeling of betrayal Bernie’s been feeling ever since she found out. But Serena got weak for a short instant, screwed up momentarily. Serena with that F1 was like post-appendicitis peritonitis, acute and dangerous, but manageable when caught and treated in time –in most cases.

Bernie on the other hand, although she noticed Sarah on her very first day about a couple of months after Jason's wedding, didn't immediately know she was in trouble. Sarah is a forty-three years old general surgeon, who specializes in abdominal trauma injuries and will definitely give her last name to one of her brilliant ideas before she reaches Bernie's age at the rate she's going. Sarah caught her attention by being a pretty brunette who likes to keep her hair short and whose authority is never ever questioned on the job, even from day one; Bernie thinks she missed those red flags because Sarah also has huge blue-grey eyes and is boldly confident without being nearly as headstrong as Serena. Bernie messed up on the long term, like insidious and malignant glioblastoma, because Bernie switched shifts with other people just so she'd get to see Sarah almost every day and genuinely thought of it as needing to observe the newest member of her team, Bernie glossed over her personal past because it's nobody's business but had no issue explaining the visible scar on her neck and enjoying the younger woman's admiration like the big macho army medic she apparently still is, and Bernie let herself actually flirt back after Sarah accidentally let slip that she definitely had  _been to Stepney_ and thought it might simply be some form of LGBT solidarity.

It took too long for her to realise what was really happening and why she felt so much more alive near Sarah –yet overly nostalgic after those shifts– and too long to read through the subtext she was actively responding to, enjoying the familiarity without consciously identifying it for what it was. 

But she did notice eventually, on a day they kept teasing each other in theatre and Bernie almost called her Serena. And although she spent that afternoon reviewing their friendship and the many clues she should have seen earlier, she still didn't try to stop it, didn't even try to reign it in a little. She simply let the tide carry her, carry them, all the while powerless to fight against her will to enjoy the resemblance and not care about anything else.

And so Bernie invited Sarah over tonight, after a shift that involved another overdose of sexual tension behind surgical masks, the deja vu so strong she can't hear the guilt, can't shake the feeling that she's not really in Nairobi, not today, not at all.

Bernie smiles reassuringly, as always avoiding to look too deeply into beautiful off-coloured eyes, before guiding the younger woman's hand away from the paler and injured skin and onto her breast. All the while hoping, and knowing, that the tears she's barely holding in will only be interpreted as another reaction to the physical scarring and how it got there.

“I know you won’t,” she replies instead of what Sarah deserves to hear.

But when a tender, satisfied grin illuminates the younger woman's face as her hand starts to expertly tease at Bernie's nipple, the truth doesn't matter any longer.

It's not like Bernie knows everything there is to know about Sarah any way, and Bernie pretends she finds it’s a good enough excuse when the one reason for it is that, all through their months of trauma centre bantering, she only ever seemed to hear and remember facts that reminded her of Serena. 

But Bernie is too deep into dealing with her own grief to regret it even now, is so selfishly focused on her own pain that she doesn't want to foresee the one she'll undoubtedly cause very soon, instead mirthlessly jokes to herself that at least their names are so similar she won't have to bit her lips too hard if and when she doesn't moan the right one.

And as Bernie tries to pay attention to the cues Sarah is giving her, tries not to get too lost into specific moves Serena couldn't get enough of and fails a couple of times, she knows she's not being the most focused and best shag she could be; she still knows the basics and she does a good enough job more than once that night.

She doesn't want to see Sarah when she first comes herself, doesn't want to think of anything but the surgeon hand inside of her that's talented and caring enough she can pretend it belongs to someone else. She keeps her eyes open later on though, when she's so close again, and it's picturing daring hazels staring up from between her thighs that pushes her over the edge.

When the sun rises, Bernie can't flee. It's her flat they spent the night at, her own bed they slept in. And even if she could pick up her clothes and leave silently in the early morning, she couldn't escape the mess she’s just put herself into.

So instead she lays there, listening to regular and alien breathing coming from the other side of the bed. Moves her head against the pillow and winces at the sting of residual pain in the back of her neck from the fractured vertebrae that nearly paralysed her. Allows herself, if not Sarah, to trace the nicely patched up and forever altered skin covering her sternum, imagines she can touch the long consolidated ribs that got intentionally broken for cardiothoracic surgery and still sting from time to time, pictures the expert stitches along the wall of the artery that ruptured and could have killed her.

She applies the slightest amount of pressure on the left of her scar, counting the cycles in her head and thinking how silly it is, people's tendency to link a useful but simple mechanical pump such as the myocardial muscle, to emotions it has no actual connections with.

And yet she could swear she can feel, stronger than any day before, the poorly patched up wound her own heart carries along with every beat.


End file.
